Remember when everyone was thinking of heading to the beach in February, dear readers?  Well, as we all knew, here we are in March paying for the unseasonable warmth with…unseasonable cold.  March, it truly seems, has trotted in like the proverbial lion…

…But is that what that phrase actually means?  A few years ago, The Paris Review published a fascinating piece on the phrase “in like a lion, out like a lamb”, trying to conclude the origin of the phrase in an article that is both informative and delightfully quirky.  I’ll just leave it here for you to check out.

And if you’re looking for things to keep you busy this chilly weekend, here are a selection of the super-terrific books that have waltzed their way onto our shelves this week, and are very eager to make your acquaintance!  Though the summer thrillers are already making their appearance, they are also perfectly suitable for helping you through a lion-like March just fine:

The Girl Before: Oh hey, look!  It’s another book with “Girl” in the title.   *Sigh*.  Anyways, despite my overwhelming frustration with this trend, there’s no arguing that J.P. Delaney’s is getting everyone very excited–critics, authors, and reviewers alike are raving, and Ron Howard has already started adapting it for film.  The story centers around two women who, it would seem, have found the perfect home; an architectural marvel; a masterpiece in design.  However, enigmatic architect who designed the house retains full control: no books, no throw pillows, no photos or clutter or personal effects of any kind. The space is intended to transform its occupant—and it does..  But before they move in, they are both confronted with an odd request….Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.  For Emma, who is still coping with the after-effects of a traumatic break-in, this is the first place that feels safe.  For Jane, who is dealing with a painful tragedy, the place (and its creator) are a haven and a welcome distraction.  Until Jane learns about the girl before her, and her untimely end.  And as she tries to uncover the truth about Emma, she finds herself caught in the same situation, encountering the same people–and sharing the same fate?  This is a twisty, turny, psychological novel that is drawing comparisons to Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, with the USA Today gleefully commenting that “Delaney has created a genuinely eerie, fascinating setting in One Folgate Street. . . . The novel’s structure, volleying back and forth as first Emma and then Jane begin to question their improbable luck, is beautifully handled. The pages fly.”

Her Every Fear: And while we’re on the topic of houses being scary, Peter Swanson’s newest book features a Boston house doing it’s best to freak us all out, and the woman who has to face down the truth these walls conceal.  Kate Priddy has always been anxious and perhaps a bit obsessive–traits that grow nearly crippling after an ex-boyfriend kidnaps and nearly kills her. When Corbin Dell, a distant cousin in Boston, suggests the two temporarily swap apartments, Kate, now an art student in London, leaps at the idea, hoping that a change of scene will help her get a grip on her life again.  But soon after her arrival at Corbin’s Beacon Hill apartment, Kate makes a shocking discovery: his next-door neighbor, a young woman named Audrey Marshall, has been murdered.  Though Corbin is quick to profess his innocence, several discoveries in the apartment make the jet-lagged Kate more and more uneasy about her cousin–and Alan, the quiet, attractive young man across the courtyard.  Is there anyone she can trust?  Swanson excels at writing good noir, shifting narrative perspective with ease and creating an atmosphere that is being compared to Hitchcock’s Rear Window as his heroine confronts the evil before her and the fear inside her in a story that earned a starred review from Booklist, who said “The skillfully conjured Boston winter creates the perfect atmosphere for breeding paranoia… Swanson … introduces a delicious monster-under-the-bed creepiness to the expected top-notch characterization and steadily mounting anxiety.”

The Dry: From the chill of a Boston winter, we move to the deadly heat of an Australian summer in Jane Harper’s mystery debut.  Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades, after being summoned to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Two decades ago, Falk was accused of murder, and Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.  Now, amidst the worst drought in a century, Aaron is beginning to realize just how well little towns can keep secrets–and to discover who killed his best friend.  In addition to praising Harper’s ability to set a scene, crafting the choking heat and creeping menace of a hometown that will make your skin crawl, her talent at crafting a mystery has reviewers raving.  Kirkus gave it a starred review, declaring it “A nail-biting thriller…A chilling story set under a blistering sun, this fine debut will keep readers on edge and awake long past bedtime.”

The Aleppo Cookbook: It probably should come as a surprise that one of the world’s most long-inhabited cities is also home to some of its richest culinary traditions. And in this stunning new cookbook, Marlene Matar, one of the Arab world’s most renown chefs, takes us on a tour of the many cultures, people, and ingredients that have shaped, and been shaped by, this remarkable city.  Along with the requisite pictures of food (which are quite enough to produce a fit of the munchies in and of themselves), there are also a number of photographs of the markets and people of Aleppo, offering readers insight into life there today.  The result is a deliciously enticing cookbook, as well as a haunting testament to the survival, endurance, and humanity of the people of Syria.

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich: It has taken several generations of historians to being to tackle the nuances and intricacies of the Third Reich–and understandably so, as we are still trying to cope with the larger horrors of the Holocaust–but within recent years, some genuinely fascinating pieces have been written on gender, economics, humor and, now, on the drugs of Hitler’s Germany.  Though the Nazi party may have touted an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity, Norman Ohler reveals that the Third Reich was actually saturated with drugs of all kinds.  Powerhouses like Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers.  Indeed, soldiers were fed a form of crystal meth in order to keep their morale and ‘fighting spirit’ high (which is a big step up from the cocaine that they were fed during the First World War).  Rather than seeing this widespread intoxication as an excuse or a rationale for the course of history, Ohler instead argues that drugs are a vital way of making sense of Nazi German society.  His work is well-researched and completely readable, making for a book that has been garnering praise from historians and pop-culture outlets alike, with the British Times praising its depiction of “how Nazi Germany slid towards junkie-state status. It is an energetic … account of an accelerating, modernizing society, an ambitious pharmaceuticals industry, a military machine that was looking for ways to create an unbeatable soldier, and a dictator who couldn’t function without fixes from his quack … It has an uncanny ability to disturb.”

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!

We were mired in a wealth of technical difficulties on Friday, beloved patrons (it’s been a frustrating month for technology, but we hope that it’s all under control at last), and as a result, we missed our regular Five Book Friday post, for which, a whole wheelbarrow-full of apologies.  As a way to make it up to you, we are bringing you a heaping Six Book Sunday, featuring some of the newest books to shuffle up onto our shelves this week, including a snazzy extra book for your reading pleasure!

All Our Wrong Todays: One of the most anticipated releases of the year, Elan Mastai’s novel of life, love, and time travel somehow manages to live up to all its hype, delivering a story that is unexpectedly funny and stunningly touching.  In Tom Barren’s version of 2016, technology has progressed, war is an outdated concept, and everyone lives a life of well-regulated hedonism.  But Tom Barren’s world has never been one into which he fit.  Then a bizarre time-traveling mishap launches Tom into our 2016.  It all seems like some kind of dystopian nightmare at first, but then Tom meets this world’s version of his family and acquaintances, and realizes that this messy, dirty, nasty world of ours might be worth much more than he first thought.  What makes this book so incredible is how Mastai blends complex science with simple, earnest, heartfelt story-telling to make a book that is high-concept, but utterly accessible.  RT Book Reviews gave his work a Top Pick rating, saying, “With humor, grace and dizzying skill, Mastai crafts a time-traveling novel that challenges every convention of the trope, and succeeds brilliantly. His droll, unassuming writing style couches a number of razor-sharp critiques…while the endless array of technological gadgets, innovations and possibilities give the story its drive and irresistible exuberance… heartrending, funny, smart, and stunningly, almost brazenly hopeful.”

Boston’s Massacre: Perfectly timed to coincide with the 247th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Eric Hinderaker’s book offers a new take on this seminal event in the run-up to the American War of Independence.  On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people–yet for all that we reference the event, very little about the “Boston Massacre” is known for a fact.  In this thoroughly-researched and illuminating work, Professor Hinderaker takes on the multiple competing narratives that emerged from the ‘massacre’, and draws connections between this event and more modern examples of police brutality, showing that the Boston Massacre still has some significance today.  As Publisher’s Weekly notes, “Hinderaker claims no definitive version of the event, instead offering a thoughtful meditation on the episode’s significance for shared American identity and memory. Untangling the complex circumstances under which Britain stationed thousands of troops in Boston in the peacetime of 1768…He ends with a provocative…reflection on the massacre’s symbolic resonance with more recent examples of police brutality, making this book important reading for anyone interested in questions regarding the limits of authority and protest.”

Girl in Disguise: Even though I’ve publicly stated that I will no longer tolerate another novel with “girl” in the title, Greer Macallister’s historic mystery is good enough to make me want to bend the rules.  With no money and no husband, Kate Warne finds herself with few choices. The streets of 1856 Chicago offer a desperate widow mostly trouble and ruin–unless that widow has a knack for manipulation and an unusually quick mind. In a bold move that no other woman has tried, Kate convinces the legendary Allan Pinkerton to hire her as a detective.  Faced with fighting criminals and coworkers alike, Kate immerses herself in the dangerous life of an operative, winning the right to tackle some of the agency’s toughest investigations, even at the risk to her own life and spirit.  Based on the adventures of real-life detective Kate Warne, Macallister has crafted a action-packed thrill-ride through 1850’s America that Booklist called “a rip-roaring, fast-paced treat to read, with compelling characters, twisted villains, and mounds of historical details adeptly woven into the tale of a courageous woman who loves her job more than anything or anyone else.”

Who Killed Piet Barol?:  Keeping within the realms of historic fiction, we have Richard Mason’s second book featuring Piet Barol (the first being History of a Pleasure Seeker), here, it is 1914, and Piet is living large in South Africa’s Cape Colony, pursuing his constant hunger for riches and comfort, even as imperial official ruthlessly turn native inhabitants out of their homes in an attempt to create a land of white settlers.  However, Piet’s prodigious luck is about to run out.  Reinventing himself once again as a furniture dealer–but the wood he needs is in a forbidden forest filled with sacred, untouchable trees. His pursuit of the bewitched trees of the fabled forest of Gwadana takes him deep into the Xhosa homelands, where unfailing charm, wit and the friendship of two black men are his only allies as he attempts an act of supreme audacity: to steal a forest from its rightful owners.  Mason always does a superb job of crafting a setting, and the portrait he paints of the violent and fascinating Cape Colony is one of his finest.  But more than that, this narrative–a bizarre blend of fact, fable, horror and hilarity, is one that is hard to put down or forget.  Library Journal loved this book, remarking on its “Eloquent, sensuous prose . . . Mason imbues the forest with life, taking readers inside the psyche of each tree, animal, or insect, as it senses the looming danger . . . Vivid . . . This profoundly tragic tale, in which colonialism battles tribal customs, and divisions of race and class sow distrust, should put Mason over the top.”

Lincoln in the Bardo: Quite seriously, it’s only March, and George Saunders’ first full-length novel may be the biggest, most acclaimed book of the entire year.  After Lincoln’s beloved son, Willie, dies the president is bereft. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.  On one level, this is a novel about monumental loss–not only Lincoln’s son, but the thousands and thousands of sons who were killed in the Civil War, and the optimism of a nation that very nearly tore itself apart.  On the other, it is a stunning, whimsical, haunting story about life and living, that features an astounding number of individual voices, viewpoints, and truths.  For those who like audiobooks, Saunders gathered over 100 narrators for this book, making it one of the most impressive productions of the year, as well.  It’s hard to choose one good review out of the countless numbers that are rolling in, but we’ll go with Kirkus’ review here, which called this book “Exhilarating . . . Ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me: Oliver Sacks died of cancer in August of 2015, leaving behind a fascinating body of work focused on the brain, its vagaries, and the way it made us uniquely–sometimes bizarrely–human, a number of touching books and memoirs…and Bill Hayes, a photographer who came to New York in 2009 after the death of his partner, and fell in love with the city at night, with the people who inhabited it, and, especially, with his neighbor, Sacks.   This book of vignettes of Hayes’ memories of Sacks, and their shared love of New York City, including a number of Hayes startlingly honest, utterly captivating photos, offers a touchingly intimate view of a man that so many felt they knew from his books, from his falling in love for the first time at the age of 75 to his death.  While a heart-rending tale of loss, it is also a beautiful meditation on the moments that make life worth living, and the kind of love that comes along once in a lifetime.  Newsweek summed it up beautifully, saying “Buy a box of tissues and pray for snow: This…will have you alternately bawling and giddily clapping your hands for the lovers that may not have had the time they deserved, but certainly made the best with the time that they had.”

Until later, beloved patrons–happy reading!